Two Utterly Desperate Songs That You Love

The first is The Cure’s Lovesong. Admit it. You love this song. You love the way Robert Smith’s voice tries so valiantly, and fails so miserably, to hide his desperation. In fact, you love this about damn near every song in The Cure’s 30 year catalog. Even the songs ruminating on his desperation seem to be concealing an even deeper desperation, like those never ending Russian dolls, or that scary story where the guy keeps taking off shirts until we find out that he was really just all shirts, or the old lady from that Stephen Hawking anecdote who claims that the universe is just turtles all the way down. You get a sense that it’s just desperation all the way down for Smith. The only real difference is the manner and extent to which he decides to conceal it. Oh but man on Lovesong, it’s just brutal. It’s the starkest example of a disparity between his attempt at genuine love song and the resulting song, which probably can’t, in good conscience, be called a love song, but is nevertheless infinitely more interesting than some “pure” love song. To put the matter frankly, the love in Lovesong is unhealthy. It’s chillingly dysfunctional, really. It’s a love borne out of an almost pathetic insecurity. And what’s more, you’re absolutely certain Smith actually believes that he will always love whomever the song is about. There’s no doubt about it. And yet you’re equally certain that there will come a time—and that time has likely passed long ago—that Smith will no longer love the person. So the whole song is a lie, but a lie that Smith forces himself to believe because the truthful, transitory nature of love would be too painful to admit.
This is the first song that made me wish I had come of age in the 80’s. Even though I’ll probably always contend that I wouldn’t have survived my teenage years without Jawbreaker, I think had I discovered The Cure, like so many who were teenagers in the 80’s did, I’d have been fine.

The second is Jean is Dead by the Descendents. Admit it. You haven’t heard this song. And, if that’s true, then in the words of Jay-Z, I feel bad for you, son. Because, whether you’ve heard it or not, you love it. It’s not the average song about suicide, in which the retrospective songwriter tries to make ex-post sense of the tragedy (for a good example of this type of song, see History to the Defeated by the Weakerthans. For a bad example of this type of song, see any other song that tries to do this). Jean is Dead is as selfish about feelings as is possible, perhaps even more selfish than the act of suicide itself, which is probably a topic for a different day. The emphasis of this song is on the “and I’m alone” portion of the phrase “now you’re gone and I’m alone.” Seems selfish, yeah, but anyone who’s known someone who has committed suicide can instantly relate. As much as we want to think of the bigger picture, or respect the wishes of the dead, it’s about us. You should have told me, I should have known, why’d you do it, etc. It’s horrible and weird and desperate of us to react this way, but suicide is a horrible, weird, and desperate thing. I could go on for pages about this song, but I’ll stop here. You just gotta hear it. Preferably alone, at night, while drinking a nice bordeaux and contemplating the people who have
inexplicably exited your life, through suicide or just chance fallings out, or even just because you were a total dick and drove everyone you have ever loved away.

One last thing that these two songs have in common: both are 80's songs. This is not to say both were incidentally written, recorded, and released in the 80's, but rather both are instantly recognizable as capturing some element of that decade. It's a subject that I've been thinking about more and more, and which lurks in the shadows every time someone brings up the fact that some of my favorite albums "don't hold up" or "sound dated." To fully explain this phenomenon will require more time and space than this article can sustain, but suffice it to say, for the time being, that part of what makes these two songs particularly effective in the ought seven is their stunning lack of timelessnesss. They're relics. But they're relics of something profound, something in which the particularity of time lends itself to the inference of universality. It is precisely the fact that they can be instantly located in the spirit of a bygone era that make them all the more poignant to those of us who were not a part of that era; the specific being that strange ancillary to the universal.